The latest Hollywood star to crash land in Downtopia is star of Sideways, Paul
Giamatti, who arrives on ITV for the Downton Abbey Christmas Special. Benji
Wilson meets him

Paul Giamatti has just met the Prince of Wales. Not that Prince of Wales, but the one known as David who would go on to become Edward VIII. And of course not the real David but an actor playing him, in full regalia at a party in the Downton AbbeyChristmas Special.

Sitting in a side room at Goldsmiths’ Hall in London, which doubles up as Buckingham Palace for the episode, trussed up in starched white tie and looking – as he often does - a little addled, Giamatti recounts the scene.

“I go blundering over to the Prince of Wales – thinking – I’ll just shake his hand.”

Needless to say the Prince is a little taken aback at this flagrant breach of protocol, and merely looks through Giamatti’s brash American businessman as if he were another footman. “He blows me off. Hopefully it’s funny. I do a lot of that in this episode.”

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But it’s the casting of Giamatti that is quite the coup for Downton’s producers – Giamatti is not merely famous but credible with it, ever since his brilliant lead performance in Alexander Payne’s Sideways in 2004brought him mainstream acclaim. World-weary is his default position, he’s a self-styled character actor who can inhabit leads, too, as he showed playing the second President in HBO’s 2008 mini-series John Adams. In the last year alone he’s brought his wry intelligence and quicksilver presence to parts in everything from12 Years a Slaveto Saving Mr Banks.

In Downton Abbey, Giamatti plays Shirley MacLaine’s son Harold, Cora’s brother. The two Americans form something of a Yankee double act in King George’s court. The feature-length episode, which is rather uncharitably not set at Christmas, brings most of the cast to London for Lady Rose’s (Lily James) presentation to the King in 1923. It includes a climactic debutante’s ball at the Crawley’s previously unseen London mansion. And Paul Giamatti.

Paul Giamatti in the 2013 Downton Abbey Christmas Special

“I’m this immensely wealthy businessman,” says Giamatti, “who had some sort of involvement in the crooked deals that were part of this thing called the Teapot Dome scandal during the President Harding administration. Harold has come to London to lay low.”

Harold Levinson is roundly derided as a playboy by Cora and Robert. But in Giamatti’s hands he’s not particularly playboy-ish.

“I thought it was kind of interesting the way the character was written,” says Giamatti. “He’s awkward and not terribly comfortable in these social situations. He’s more comfortable in business. He obviously whores around a lot on yachts and stuff like that, but it’s not his primary interest.”

In fact, his primary interest comes in the form of the daughter of a Lord Aysgarth, played by James Fox. Aysgarth has a title but no money, and as such has designs on Shirley MacLaine’s fortune. He encourages his beautiful daughter (Poppy Drayton) to have designs on her son, too.

“He sets his daughter on me. And so there’s a little thing that happens there, and interesting interaction,” says Giamatti with a grin.

The cast of the 2013 Downton Abbey Christmas Special, including Paul Giamatti, sixth from the left

America’s fascination with Downton Abbey is becoming almost as fascinating as the show itself. We have heard how everyone from P Diddy to Newt Gingrich wouldn’t mind a spot on the show. We were delighted, though hardly dumbstruck, to find that Shirley MacLaine had been cast as a New World counterpoint to Dame Maggie Smith’s Old World hauteur. But Paul Giamatti? Even he says he was taken back at the reaction to his casting.

“I have never done anything where it was announced I was going to do it and people went more crazy about it. I really haven’t. I had perfect strangers coming up to me in the subway and the street.”

How exactly did this Yale-educated, Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning indie staple find himself in Downton?

“My agent,” he says in a low voice that quickly descends to a whispered purr, “told me that they were interested in me. Then I got the script and I was happy to do it. I like the period thing, and I liked the slightly soap opera-y nature of it. I grew up on Upstairs, Downstairs. My mother was really in to stuff like that and I grew up watching it. So I had heard about Downton.”

Giamatti was born in 1967 in Connecticut, his father a Yale professor and his mother an English teacher at the prestigious Hopkins School. He is a Broadway veteran; I’m still not quite sure I believe that he is a devout Downton fan…

“I hadn’t seen every episode of the show – now I’ve seen more of it - but I enjoyed it,” he says, a little hazily.

And did the fact that he’s a self-confessed Anglophile have anything to do with his decision to grab a couple of weeks in the UK?

“I love it over here. It’s not the primary reason I did it but I was like… great, I get a free trip to London. The primary reason was the show. I just thought it would be fun to do something like this: the idea of being the American dropped down in the middle of it is funny to me.”

This is typical soft-pedalling from Giamatti, a man for whom hyperbole and excitement are about as alien as twerking. Yet he says that he found himself playing up to his role as a brash outsider when he was among the British cast.

“I’ve found that when I start talking I almost feel like I’m doing a fake American accent. I feel so American. I’m supposed to in some ways but gahd,” he says, shifting in to a fake American accent, “there are times when I feel like I’m too loud and flat and just ‘wha wha wha’-ing a little bit.”

I wonder if the appeal of Harold Levinson to Giamatti is because he is a strong, confident character, a man who, in spite of being snubbed by the Prince of Wales, is a winner. Giamatti plays crooks and cranks to perfection, with a particular sideline in hapless dupes.

“It’s true - what is different about Harold is he’s more straightforwards powerful. He’s not a mess, the way most of the guys I play are – a neurotic mess. I just did The Spider-Man movie [The Amazing Spider-Man 2] right before this where I played Rhino, this mobster who would scream and blow things up and shoot things. So it was nice to be a bit more normal. Get dressed up.”

And it must be said – in spite of my misgivings his face fits. “They’ve constructed the storyline in such a way that I suppose they could, if they wanted, bring me back. They’ve left it open ended.”

I suspect that we know precisely what will happen – with Downton having just been commissioned for a fifth series, and Giamatti’s role in the Christmas Special so flawlessly accomplished, we will all reconvene, same time, same place, next Christmas.

The Downton Abbey Christmas special is on ITV on Christmas Day at 8.30pm